Age-related macular disease (AMD) and the retinitis pigmentosa (RP) disease have been identified as major causes of blindness, especially for senior people worldwide. Retinal prosthesis device offers possible restoration of part of the vision to the blindness. Typically, the device includes electrodes requiring separate wiring implant to control each electrode. However, field of view provided by such devices, which depends on the number of electrodes included in the device, may be severely limited because of size limitation on the wiring implant.
Furthermore, the image resolution of a retina prosthesis device may be related to density of electrodes in the device. Conventional devices for retina prosthesis may include driving circuit chips separate from electrode or image sensor chips implanted to retina tissues. Thus, the required number of electrical interconnections between the electrode chips and the driving circuit chips can increase significantly to impose unnecessary ceilings on possible image resolution achievable.
In addition, existing retina prosthesis devices may be based on electrodes made of planner chips not conforming to non-planar shapes of retina tissues. As a result, additional interferences among the electrodes may occur because of the mismatch in shapes to further limit possible image resolution of the device.
Thus, traditional retina prosthesis devices are inherently limited to provide levels of image resolutions, field of views or other visual characteristics to achieve levels close to a real retina to help patients recover from impaired vision capabilities.